Calling
by Violet Fairychild
Summary: I always thought when she...if she...died before me...that I wouldn’t be able to feel her in my head anymore. ScottxJean, set post X2 with X3 in mind.


**Calling**

"Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell." –Emily Dickinson

_The clock counts the seconds out in a staccato beat, one, two three. His heart sounds dully in his chest like an empty oatmeal tin being struck with a rubber mallet. He pays no attention to either, instead letting the rhythm of the rain lull his mind into the numb stupor that has been his only comfort for the last several days. That feeling of being neither awake nor dreaming, where he can forget about everything and forget about her and even, please god, forget that he exists at all. Dying of a broken heart seems such a romantic cliché, but Scott Summers is beyond clichés. Beyond hope. If he concentrates hard enough, he can almost feel his heartbeats slowing, almost succumb to his bleakest wish._

_But just as before her specter pulls him back from the edge._

"Scott."

She was beautiful in the candlelight. The goddess, illuminated. Scott smiled at his own overwrought prose.

"A penny for your thoughts?" A sly smile crept over Jean's face as she appreciated the humor in her own joke. Tiny flames flickered in her eyes, and reflected satin-gold in her hair. She raised her glass of wine to her lips, still peeking at him over the rim as she took a small sip.

"You're beautiful," he said. Her cheeks colored just enough that he noticed, and it gave him a surprising sense of pride.

"Is something going on? You've been acting strange all night." Setting down her glass, Jean stood and started gathering dishes to take to the sink. "Are you trying to butter me up?"

"What, a guy can't give his girl a compliment for no reason?" Scott followed suit, collecting the wine glasses and silverware.

"Mmm." A non-response to keep things light. He wasn't the only one who had difficulty discussing their relationship sometimes. Jean set the plates in the sink with a clatter and turned the water on. "Set those down and help me load the dishwasher?"

"What?" Scott's throat went unexpectedly tight, and his hands fisted around the dishes in his hands.

The water ran into the sink, flowing over the leftover food, rushing down to fill the void. All of a sudden the world was small and hot and filled with running water, and Jean's face was unbearably close as she turned to repeat herself. "Scott? Help me?"

Water. Filling the void.

_"Help me!"_

_He opens his eyes with a gasp, hot tears cutting a path down his cold face. The voice was unquestionably hers-not just in how it sounded, but in how it felt ringing through his head. Like when she was alive. He'd tried talking to the Professor about it, but had received little guidance. Xavier was being tight-lipped about the whole thing, Scott felt, more so than he might have expected from a man who claimed to love them._

_But then-there really is no preparing for the loss of someone you love, is there?_

_The hardest part was trying to keep it together in front of the students. One minute he would be fine, collecting assignments, chalking diagrams on a blackboard…and then she would be there, in his head again, ripping through every support he had thrown up to hold him steady. Taunting, begging, forcing him to the floor with the onslaught of words and images. "Please help me, Scott. It's so cold. The water…"_

"It's too cold." Jean turned the faucet handle all the way to the left, jumping when he grabbed her right hand by the wrist and pulled her around to face him. She jumped again as the glasses and silverware hit the floor in the next instant.

"What did you say!" His chest was tight, heaving. Her eyes widened in alarm at the sudden change in demeanor.

"I said the water's too cold, Scott. It was hurting my hand." She looked at the arm he held captive. "_You're_ hurting my hand."

He let go almost instantly, reaching up to cover the offending hand like it was a separate entity from his body. "I'm sorry. I just…I'm jumpy tonight. I'm sorry," he said again, reaching out to caress the small of her back. Glass crunched underfoot as he stepped towards her. "Damnit."

"I'll get the broom, don't cut yourself," she warned, stepping over the debris to get to the closet where the cleaning supplies were stored. A shaky smile tried to fight its way onto her mouth, but turned into a slight grimace instead. "Jumpy doesn't even begin to cover it."

Scott turned the faucet off, finding that his nerves calmed considerably once the water had stopped running. It's nothing, he told himself. There is nothing wrong tonight. Everything's perfect.

As Jean cleaned up the broken glass, Scott found himself staring at the vase on the table. It was small and made of cut crystal, and two red roses stood proudly in their five inches of clear water. Something about them bothered him, made the tightness in his chest return. They were perfect. Two perfect red roses.

…_floating in the water… _

_He'd gone back to Alkali Lake twice since it had happened, once with several mourners from the school, once by himself. Both times he'd taken a rose for her; Red, for true love. The first had bobbed ungracefully in the water before falling beneath the surface. The second had been caught in a current, getting whisked away from the shore and out of his range of sight in a matter of minutes. The act was supposed to bring him closure. It didn't._

_He'd just wanted a chance to say goodbye. That was all he wanted, was_

"A chance to say goodbye." The words spilled from his lips before he could stop them.

Rocking back on her heels to look up at him from the kitchen floor, Jean looked exasperated and a little worn. "A chance to say goodbye? To who?"

"To you." He crouched next to her on the floor. "That's all this was supposed to be. A chance…" His words trailed off in shock as the room around him began to disintegrate, pixel by pixel, revealing the machinery beneath. Jean's face melted away, familiar flesh dissolving into the flat gray sheen of a robotic form. "No. No! I just wanted to tell you goodbye! That's all I wanted-"

_The Danger Room came to him in a flash of innovation, a last desperate attempt to put his psyche back together. It had her physical dimensions and likeness on file. It had her voice algorithms, even a rough composite of her personality. _

_He hadn't expected it to feel as real as it did, though Scott knew his grasp on reality wasn't all that great these days anyway. Why stop with just a farewell? Why not enjoy an evening, one last evening, with the woman he loved? _

_Even though he knew what the answers to those questions should be, he stayed._

"Scott." Not her voice, anymore, but his. Professor Xavier wheeled into the room wearing an expression somewhere between heartbreak and fury. "You shouldn't have done this."

He was still crouched on the floor, head cradled in his hands. It muffled his voice. "I didn't get to tell her goodbye."

"None of us did, my boy." Xavier maneuvered his chair over to the miserable figure that huddled in front of him. Scott lurched over, taking the older man by surprise as he threw his arms around the professor's waist and buried his face in his leg. He wasn't sobbing, not yet-his chest heaved and he breathed heavily through gritted teeth as he tried to compose himself. Xavier rested a gentle hand on his head and let him hurt.

After a few minutes of clinging to the professor as though he were a life raft, Scott lifted his face to speak, a film of tears drying on his cheeks. "I always thought when she…if she…died before me," he stammered, "that I wouldn't be able to feel her in my head anymore.

"But _she's still there_," he continued, voice dropping to a strained whisper. "Not all the time, but it's like a door opens in my mind…she's not at peace."

"She is at peace. Jean didn't want to die, but she understood the choice she was making. I felt her composure, her strength of will." Xavier looked hard through the ruby lenses of Scott's glasses, wishing he could see the expression in his eyes. The emotions coming off him were so frantic and confused it was hard to tell what he thought he was feeling.

"Then why won't she stop?"

Xavier didn't respond, instead placing a gentle suggestion in Scott's mind to sleep. He might have felt guilty if he'd had to use much coercion, but almost instantly the younger man's head dropped from exhaustion.

The professor did not leave immediately after Logan and Ororo had left to take Scott back to his room. Instead he sat for a long time in the Danger Room, contemplating the simulation robot still crouched on the floor. Replaying the scene he had interrupted.

"_I just wanted to tell you goodbye."_

_Scott goes to the bathroom sink, splashes water on his face, tries to think rationally. They hadn't recovered her body. His Jean, left to twist in the water like so much driftwood. The burning in his gut rises to his throat and he fights to keep the bile down._

_His bag is still half packed from his last trip to the lake. No roses this time. This time he will cry and rage and evaporate as much of that goddamned lake as he can before his blasts give out._

_The professor might not believe it, the others might think he's lost his mind, but Scott knows she's calling him and he's going to answer her. As he picks up his bag and heads out the door, already something responds deep in his mind. Yes. This is what he needs to do. _

_She's waiting._


End file.
